Eighty-Five from the Archive: Susan Sontag

This year is The New Yorker’s eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine’s history. The issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day’s selection is posted.

Susan Sontag once said that she didn’t want only to express alienation. And indeed, in much of her work, Sontag’s visceral prose draws the reader unflinchingly close to her subjects, no matter how foreign or unsettling. Sontag contributed thirteen pieces to The New Yorker from 1973 to 2002, including “Looking at War,” a critical analysis of war photography and the iconography of suffering. In the mid-eighties, as the AIDS crisis was developing, Sontag wrote a short story titled “The Way We Live Now,” about the reactions of an unnamed man’s close friends as they discover that he has the disease. The piece received a huge amount of attention at the time as one of the first American stories about AIDS:

And when, not right away but still only three weeks later, he was accepted into the protocol for the new drug, which took considerable behind-the-scenes lobbying with the doctors, he talked less about being ill, according to Donny, which seemed like a good sign, Kate felt, a sign that he was not feeling like a victim, feeling not that he had a disease but, rather, was living with a disease (that was the right cliché, wasn’t it?), a more hospitable arrangement, said Jan, a kind of cohabitation which implied that it was something temporary, that it could be terminated, but terminated how, said Hilda, and when you say hospitable, Jan, I hear hospital. And it was encouraging, Stephen insisted, that from the start, at least from the time he was finally persuaded to make the telephone call to his doctor, he was willing to say the name of the disease, pronounce it often and easily, as if it were just another word, like boy or gallery or cigarette or money or deal, as in no big deal, Paolo interjected, because, as Stephen continued, to utter the name is a sign of health, a sign that one has accepted being who one is, mortal, vulnerable, not exempt, not an exception after all, it’s a sign that one is willing, truly willing, to fight for one’s life.